Showing papers in "Organised Sound in 2017"

Ecologically Grounded Creative Practices in Ubiquitous Music

Abstract: Instrumentally oriented and individualistic approaches dominate the current perspectives on musical interaction and technologically oriented composition. A view that focuses on the broad aspects of creativity support is proposed as a viable theoretical and methodological alternative: ubiquitous music practice. This article summarises several findings in ubiquitous music research, pointing to new theoretical frameworks that tackle the volatile and distributed creativity factors involved in musical activities that take place outside of traditional venues, involving the audience as an active creative partner. A new definition of ubiquitous music is proposed encompassing four components related to the human and the material resources, the emergent properties of musical activities and the design strategies involved in supporting distributed decision making. We highlight the application of embedded-embodied cognition in creative practice, arguing for the adoption of an ecologically grounded framework as an alternative to the mainstream anthropocentric and disembodied acoustic-instrumental paradigms. We discuss the relevance of the new materialist concepts of ecologies and meshworks within artistic creative practice, highlighting the implications of the emergent creativity support methods for context-based composition.

Ecological Sound Art: Steps towards a new field

Abstract: The years since the turn of the millennium have seen an increasing number of sound artists engaging with contemporary environmental issues such as biodiversity loss, sustainability and climate change through their work, forming a growing movement of environmentally concerned sound art; however, their work has yet to achieve the recognition enjoyed by comparable environmentalist practices in almost every other art form. This article argues that this increasingly significant area of sound arts practice should be recognised as a distinct field in its own right, and proposes that it be termed ‘ecological sound art’, reflecting its equivalent in the visual arts. After establishing its current absence from both ecocritical and sound arts scholarship, it proceeds to outline some of the core approaches which characterise works of ecological sound art, as the first step towards its establishment as a coherent field of practice. The final section draws from key works of contemporary ecological theory, examining the fundamental accord that exists between the new modes of thought they propose and the ways in which we experience and relate to sound art, demonstrating that ecological sound art represents not only a significant new field of sound arts practice, but also a powerful ecological art form.

Editorial: Alternative histories of electroacoustic music

Abstract: In the more than twenty years of its existence, Organised Sound has rarely focused on issues of history and historiography in electroacoustic music research. Although some articles have adopted an explicitly historic perspective – often as the only such article within a given issue – many more have focused upon the documentation of current or recent creative practice and scientific research, the latest tools, techniques and software, or the development of new aesthetics, theory and analysis. Perhaps this should not be surprising given electroacoustic music’s close links with music technology, which like many technical disciplines is underpinned by an essentially modernist agenda of progress through technological innovation. There are, naturally, a few significant exceptions to this generalisation. Issue 9.1, marking ‘a century of innovation involving sound and technology’ (and roughly coinciding with the establishment of the Electroacoustic Music Studies Network), included several articles that directly addressed an important historiographic issue, namely, developing and maintaining source materials for musicologists (Atkinson and Landy 2004; Battier 2004; Ramel 2004; Teruggi 2004). This theme was taken further in volume 11, which foregrounded such issues as archiving (Chasalow 2006; Dal Farra 2006; Waters 2006), preservation (Emmerson 2006), approaches to technological obsolescence (Bullock and Coccioli 2006; Polfreman, Sheppard, and Dearden 2006; Wetzel 2006; Yong 2006) and the study of tools and techniques as a method in historical musicology (Manning 2006). Issue 18.3 – ‘Re-wiring Electronic Music’ – included a few articles documenting recent creative practice that implicitly adopts a historiographic or media archaeological perspective (Paiuk 2013; Parker 2013; Riis 2013). Finally, issue 20.1, marking ‘20 Years of Organised Sound’, had an explicitly retrospective emphasis, and included a range of personal reflections on electroacoustic music’s history, as well as an article on canon formation in its literary history (Mooney 2015). However, these articles represent a comparatively small proportion of Organised Sound’s total output, and many of them engage with history only from the perspective of its relevance to, or incorporation within, present-day creative practice. Manuella Blackburn’s editorial observation that ‘all this contemplation appears very current and future focused’ (Blackburn 2014) could quite reasonably be applied, then, to the majority of discourse within this journal. There is, of course, a large body of literature beyond Organised Sound that directly addresses electroacoustic music’s history. The first substantial secondary accounts and surveys began to appear in the 1960s (Prieberg 1960; Moles 1960; ORTF 1962; Davies 1968). These focused on composers, studios and technologies, and were often geographically organised, a gambit extended by many key sources that followed (Appleton and Perera 1975; Ernst 1977; Griffiths 1979; Schrader 1982; Holmes 1985; Manning 1985; Chadabe 1997). From the 1990s, disciplinary and methodological horizons broadened, with substantial contributions from the fields of anthropology (Born 1995), sound studies (Kahn 1999; Cox and Warner 2004; Sterne 2012), history of science and technology (Braun 2002; Wittje 2016), science and technology studies (Pinch and Trocco 2004), gender studies (Rodgers 2010), material culture (Weium and Boon 2013), and critical organology (Patteson 2016) to name a few. Focused studies have spotlighted individuals, institutions, and locales that had been omitted or scantily treated in earlier accounts (Kuljuntausta 2008; Niebur 2010; Adkins and Russ 2013; Tazelaar 2013; Helliwell 2016). Reprints and new editions of iconic primary sources ensure that these texts remain important also (Cage 2011; Austin and Kahn 2011; Schaeffer 2012). Any brief survey must necessarily be partial, of course. Why, then, is there a relative lack of historic perspective within Organised Sound? One possible explanation stems from the demographic of Organised Sound’s reader/authorship. As Leigh Landy has recently noted:

Sound Art Situations

Abstract: This article is an analysis of two sound art performances that took place June 2015 in outdoor public spaces in the social housing area Urbanplanen in Copenhagen, Denmark. The two performances were On the production of a poor acoustics by Brandon LaBelle and Green Interactive Biofeedback Environments (GIBE) by Jeremy Woodruff. In order to investigate the complex situation that arises when sound art is staged in such contexts, the authors of this article suggest exploring the events through approaching them as ‘situations’ (Doherty 2009). With this approach it becomes possible to engage and combine theories from several fields. Aspects of sound art studies, performance studies and contemporary art studies are presented in order to theoretically explore the very diverse dimensions of the two sound art pieces: Visual, auditory, performative, social, spatial and durational dimensions become integrated within the analysis, pursuing the most comprehensive interpretation of the pieces possible. (Less)

‘Nimble Fingers’ in Electronic Music: Rethinking sound through neo-colonial labour

Abstract: How can historians of electronic music address the factory labour of the global underclass of women building electronics used in sound technologies? How can we speak to the repetitive work of women who are racially and sexually stereotyped as having ‘nimble fingers’, being ‘detail oriented’ and ‘obedient’? Although women workers in electronics assembly are already de facto entangled in contemporary sound production, scholars have yet to enfold their lives and labour into histories of electronic music. I situate electronic sound technologies since the 1960s in the contexts of the global division of labour and the intimate disciplining of women’s bodies, and investigate the discursive fallout of transnational subcontracting in the electronics industry. I argue that rethinking the category ‘women in electronic music’ is a necessary step for sound studies and musicology, and I call for a new disciplinary understanding of electronic sound and audio as fundamentally neo-colonial.

Canonisation and Documentation of Interdisciplinary Electroacoustic Music, Exemplified by Three Cases from the Netherlands: Dick Raaijmakers, Michel Waisvisz and Huba de Graaff

Abstract: Relations between histories, sources and preservation problematics are explored by evaluating how Dutch electroacoustic musical life is discussed in international histories of electronic music. Some Dutch cases consisting of different generations of interdisciplinary, live, performance-based electroacoustic work are discussed: the work of Dick Raaijmakers, Michel Waisvisz and Huba de Graaff. These cases point to some important aspects of preservation and the formation of histories. An emphasis in electronic music histories on technology and on technological innovation comes at the expense of information on the musical and artistic aspects. For greater interest in musical aspects, it is crucial to have more access to the music itself. The works and practices of Dick Raaijmakers, Michel Waisvisz and Huba de Graaff seem to resist documentation, ontologically and practically but, on the other hand, there is a desire for its documentation and dissemination. For their work, preservation means: making something new while being faithful to the past. It is therefore that I propose to regard preservation as performance. This music only remains alive when we are not solely interested in linear innovation, but in a profound relation with the past, in reworking the past.

From Site-specific to Site-responsive: Sound art performances as participatory milieu

Abstract: This article concerns context-based live electronic music, specifically performances which occur in response to a particular location or space. I outline a set of practices which can be more accurately described as site-responsive, rather than site-specific. I develop a methodological framework for site-responsive live electronic music in three stages. First, I discuss the ambiguity of the term site-specific by drawing on its origins within the visual arts and providing examples of how it has been used within sound art. I then suggest that site-responsive performance might be a more helpful way of describing this type of activity. I argue that it affords an opportunity for music to mediate the social, drawing on Small’s idea of music as sets of third-order relationships, and Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics. Third, I suggest that with the current renewed trend for performances occurring outside of cultural institutions, it is important to be mindful of the identity of a particular site, and those who have a cultural connection to it. I make reference to a series of works within my own creative practice which have explored these ideas.

Ad-Hoc Aesthetics: Context-dependent composition strategies in music and sound art

Abstract: Contemporary trains of thought largely denounce hylomorphism and a series of dichotomies of the past in favour of rather hybrid, all-inclusive and non-anthropocentric schemata. Yet, the former seem to still pervade our understanding of music and sound art in several respects. For many, composition is a primarily abstract process, musical instruments and audio-related technologies are fixed material means, and artists are creative individuals who are solely and primarily responsible for the artworks they produce. In this article a series of ad hoc and context-dependent compositional traits are scrutinised, with reference to theory as well as to actual artistic practice (both historical and contemporary), and are shown to transcend such assumptions in more or less straightforward ways. In particular, a series of practices is examined that revolves around material inquiry, anti-optimality, and hybrid, reflexive or ‘meta’ interfaces. More, DIWO (Do It With Others) approaches to composition are discussed and shown to echo adhocracy and contextual dependency in various respects and by means of emergent autopoiesis. Certain slants to DIWO are finally examined with respect to a series of powerful (in the author’s opinion) metaphors, namely emergence, transience and post-selfhood.

Pioneer Spirits: New media representations of women in electronic music history

Abstract: The Alternative Histories of Electronic Music conference in 2016 reflected a rise in research that explores new and alternative directions in electronic music historiography. Accordingly, attention has been focused on practitioners previously either ignored or thought to be marginal; a significant number of these figures are women. This fact has caught the attention of print and online media and the independent recording industry and, as a result, historical narratives of female electronic musicians have become part of the modern music media discourse. While this has many positive aspects, some media representations of the female electronic musician raise concerns for feminist scholars of electronic music history. Following the work of Tara Rodgers, Sally MacArthur and others, I consider some new media representations of electronic music’s female ‘pioneers’, situate them in relation to both feminist musicology and media studies, and propose readings from digital humanities that might be used to examine and critique them. This article expands on a talk given at AHEM and was first conceived as a presentation for the Fawcett Society event Sound Synthesis and the Female Musician, in 2014.

Animating the Object: Marcelle Deschênes and acousmatic education in Quebec

Abstract: This article examines the early reception of Pierre Schaeffer’s theoretical work in Quebec through the teaching of Marcelle Deschenes, principal author of the first electroacoustic theory and ear training curricula at both Universite Laval and Universite de Montreal. An account of Deschenes’s educational career is provided, along with remarks on the contents of her early courses in Morpho-typology and her listening workshops for children, using newly excavated primary material from her private archives. While existing scholarship presumes that Schaefferian thinking arrived in Quebec with the ‘orthodox’ acousmatic approach of Francis Dhomont, this article asserts that a pluralist and multidisciplinary interpretation of Schaeffer’s work can be discerned which pre-dated Dhomont’s teaching and has had an equally lasting impact overall. A methodological argument is also made for including education and other forms of ‘reproductive labour’ in the history of electroacoustic music.

Loudspeakers Optional: A history of non-loudspeaker-based electroacoustic music

Abstract: The discipline of electroacoustic music is most commonly associated with acousmatic musical forms such as tape-music and musique concrete, and the electroacoustic historical canon primarily centres around the mid-twentieth-century works of Pierre Schaeffer, Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage and related artists. As the march of technology progressed in the latter half of the twentieth century, alternative technologies opened up new areas within the electroacoustic discipline such as computer music, hyper-instrument performance and live electronic performance. In addition, the areas of electromagnetic actuation and musical robotics also allowed electroacoustic artists to actualise their works with real-world acoustic sound-objects instead of or along side loudspeakers. While these works owe much to the oft-cited pioneers mentioned above, there exists another equally significant alternative history of artists who utilised electric, electronic, pneumatic, hydraulic and other sources of power to create what is essentially electroacoustic music without loudspeakers. This article uncovers this ‘missing history’ and traces it to its earliest roots over a thousand years ago to shed light on often-neglected technological and artistic developments that have shaped and continue to shape electronic music today.

Sonic autoethnographies: personal listening as compositional context

Abstract: This article discusses a range of self-reflexive tendencies in field recording, soundscape composition and studio production, and explores examples of sonic practices and works in which the personal listening experiences of the composer are a key contextual and compositional element. As broad areas for discussion, particular attention is given to soundscape composition as self-narrative (exploring the representation of the recordist in soundscape works) and to producing the hyperreal and the liminal (considering spatial characteristics of contemporary auditory experience and their consequences for sonic practice). The discussion then focuses on the specific application of autoethnographic research methods to the practice and the understanding of soundscape composition. Compositional strategies employed in two recent pieces by the author are considered in detail. The aim of this discussion is to link autoethnography to specific ideas about sound and listening, and to some tendencies in field recording, soundscape composition and studio production, while also providing context for the discussion of the author’s own practice and works. In drawing together this range of ideas, methods and work, sonic autoethnography is aligned with an emerging discourse around reflexive, embodied sound work.

Soundscape Composition: Enhancing our understanding of changing soundscapes

Abstract: This article discusses the affordances of soundscape composition and how the techniques and approaches of this genre have been embraced as an inter-disciplinary research methodology. Since its emergence from the World Soundscape Project, the concept of soundscape composition has set out to enhance our listening awareness of our soundscapes, inspiring and establishing a discourse that explores a sense of place through sound. Soundscape composition over the past decades has established itself as a popular compositional practice among acousmatic composers utilising compositional techniques that go beyond phonographic representation of acoustic environments. Electroacoustic techniques explore not only the transformation and processing of field recordings but also the spatialisation and performance techniques used to create immersive and realistic soundscapes. These compositional developments since the establishment of the World Soundscape Project have brought this genre of music to a wider audience as it has developed into a cross-disciplinary practice. Soundscape studies methodologies such as soundwalking, listening and recording are being utilised by a broader research cohort outside of soundscape composition. This article provides a survey of recent projects and compositions that incorporate a soundscape and cross-disciplinary approach that reflects a variety of cultural themes and issues within the disciplines of social, political and cultural science.

The Forgotten History of Repetitive Audio Technologies

Abstract: In the literature dedicated to twentieth-century music, the early history of electronic music is regularly presented hand in hand with the development of technical repetitive devices such as closed grooves and magnetic tape loops. Consequently, the idea that such devices were ‘invented’ in the studios of the first great representatives of electronic music tends to appear as an implicit consequence. However, re-examination of the long history of musical technology, from the ninth-century Banu Musa automatic flute to the Hammond organ of the 1930s, reveals that repetitive devices not only go right back to the earliest days of musical automation, but also evolved in a wide variety of contexts wholly unconnected from any form of musical institution. This article aims to shed light on this other, forgotten, history of repetitive audio technologies.

Inaudible Visitors: Theories of sound reproduction in the studio practice of Pierre Schaeffer

Abstract: In this article I explore the relationship of theories of sound reproduction formulated in the decades between the two world wars with the studio practice of Pierre Schaeffer. I argue that the 1920s–1930s was a period of significance for sound-based arts, and compare it to analogous defining moments in cinema and art photography. After examining the legacy of this period, I turn to one specific moment from Schaeffer’s early studio experiments with musique concrète in April 1948, showing how the theories of sound reproduction formed in the earlier time period informed practical decisions in Schaeffer’s working methods at a critical time when his ideas about the sound object were forming. Schaeffer’s studio practice and, to an extent, his theories of listening thus carry traces of this prior sonic culture. Considering the decisive influence of Schaeffer’s writings and teaching on later generations and developments in electroacoustic music, I speculate on the proliferation of these ideas beyond Schaeffer’s immediate circle, focusing in particular on soundscape composition. The title of this article is a reference to James Lastra’s ‘invisible auditor’, a term he coined to characterise the approach to sound reproduction discussed in this article (Lastra 2000: 159).

Music without musicians... but with scientists, technicians, and computer companies

Abstract: In the early days of music technologies the collaboration between musicians, scientists, technicians and equipment producers was very close. How did this collaboration develop? Why did scientific, business, and musical agendas converge towards a common goal? Was there a mutual exchange of skills and expertise? To answer these questions this article will consider a case study in early computer music. It will examine the career of the Italian cellist and composer Pietro Grossi (1917–2002), who explored computer music with the support of mainframe manufacturers, industrial RD he had to become a member, albeit an atypical one, of the Italian computing community of the time. Grossi’s story, thus, can tell us much about the collaborative efforts stimulated by the use of early computer technologies in sound research, and how these efforts developed at the intersection of science, art and industry.

Experiencing Responsive Technology in a Mixed Work: Interactive music as embodied and situated activity

Abstract: How is performing with responsive technology in a mixed work experienced by performers, and how may the notion of embodied cognition further our understanding of this interaction? These questions are addressed here analysing accounts from singers performing the author’s mixed work Metamorphoses (2015). Combining semi-structured interviews and inspiration from Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, questions concerning the ‘self’ when listening, singing, moving and relating to fellow musicians, as well as the relationship towards the computer, are explored. The results include a notion of the computer as neither separated nor detached but both, and highlight the importance of the situation, including not only the here and now but also social and cultural dimensions. The discussion emphasises the role of sensorimotor interaction and bodily experience in human meaning-making.

Early Computer Music Experiments in Australia and England

Abstract: This article documents the early experiments in both Australia and England to make a computer play music. The experiments in England with the Ferranti Mark 1 and the Pilot ACE (practically undocumented at the writing of this article) and those in Australia with CSIRAC (Council for Scientific and Industrial Research Automatic Computer) are the oldest known examples of using a computer to play music. Significantly, they occurred some six years before the experiments at Bell Labs in the USA. Furthermore, the computers played music in real time. These developments were important, and despite not directly leading to later highly significant developments such as those at Bell Labs under the direction of Max Mathews, these forward-thinking developments in England and Australia show a history of computing machines being used musically since the earliest development of those machines. 1

Across Fields: Sound, art and technology from an electromechanical perspective

Abstract: This article was published in Organised Sound on 12 July 2017 (online), available at https://doi.org/10.1017/S1355771817000188 Paper also presented at Alternative Histories of Electronic Music conference, Science Museum. London, 14th – 16th April 2016. https://ahem2016.wordpress.com

The Sound-Poetry of the Instability of Reality: The audio reality effect and mimesis

Abstract: This article proposes the audio reality effect as a meaningful translation of Roland Barthes’s literary reality effect to the sonic realm. This refinement of transcontextuality and source recognition is applied to electroacoustic music and soundscape composition using the works and writings of Emmerson, Truax, Wishart, Smalley, Fischman, Young, Norman and Field. Lastly, this study mimetically analyses 2 seconds / b minor / wave by Michael Pisaro and Taku Sugimoto in order to demonstrate the relevance of mimesis and the audio reality effect for understanding current musical practice.

A Day in Algonquin Park: William W.H. Gunn and the Circadian Audio Portrait

Abstract: This article considers the place of William W. H. ‘Bill’ Gunn in the history of electroacoustic music with a focus on one of his earliest creative forays, the 1955 production of A Day in Algonquin Park, a composition in the genre of what the authors have dubbed the circadian audio portrait. In exploring Gunn’s compositional decisions and the political and creative contexts which surrounded them, we detail his sonic practice and make the argument that Gunn was a soundscape composer before the term was coined, a forerunner of the genre indebted to composers connected with the World Soundscape Project. In doing so, we must acknowledge the ways in which the album’s creation and reception play out paradoxical aspects of the wilderness myth, while feeding into the construction of a popular and idealised Canadian identity. We also find his modernist ecological sensibility struggling to articulate a place for human visitors within nature: in this, Gunn’s outlook and concerns were not very different from some contemporary soundscape composers. However, this study goes beyond acknowledging a previously ‘unknown father’ of familiar sounds and debates; in contextualising his work with environmental sound as a contribution to the genre of the circadian audio portrait, we highlight an alternative genealogy for contemporary soundscape composition.

As the World Leaks into the Work: Composition and architecture

Abstract: This article proposes a framework as a contribution to the expansion of compositional practice. It analyses and problematises different dimensions of architectural thinking and practice, and transposes them to the field of music. This way it suggests and develops compositional strategies that are more deeply engaged with the several spatialities of music creation, performance and listening. Material, site, drawing, programme and use operate as conceptual tools to articulate music and architecture in a discussion towards a more comprehensive understanding of music composition. This was the theoretical ground of a practice-based PhD research in which I developed a portfolio of works. I will describe some of these to contextualise and demonstrate the contemporary relevance of this framework.

Sounding Riddims: King Tubby’s dub in the context of soundscape composition

Abstract: A significant body of academic literature and music journalism has explored the historical trajectory of Jamaican dub music and its innovative use of audio recording technology. The present article seeks to demonstrate the similarities between the studio compositional methods of Jamaican dub innovator King Tubby and those of Canadian soundscape composers Barry Truax and Hildegard Westerkamp. Rather than attempting to identify aesthetic and stylistic similarities between Tubby’s dub music and soundscape composition, this article presents a comparative analysis of dub in relation to soundscape composition focusing on artistic articulations of contextual meaning and acoustic communication. Specifically, this work argues that Tubby’s compositional approach directly addresses the following conceptual themes common in soundscape composition: 1) referential composition and the invocation of past listening associations through sonic abstraction, 2) timbral play as a means of linking sound processing to acoustic communication, and 3) the evocation of real-world motion cues by way of ecologically informed sound-processing effects. Exploring the conceptual similarities between Tubby’s work and the established academic-affiliated genre of soundscape composition provides a new perspective on his work as reflecting a multifaceted musical approach that warrants further scholarly study.

The Sound Bubble: A context-sensitive space in the space

Abstract: The design of sonic environments is in need of more active strategies, taking into account not only the physical but also the social and sensorial aspects of a place. This implies abandoning tradit ...

Listening for Context: Interpretation, abstraction and the real

Abstract: This article seeks to explore the proposed notion of ‘context-based composition’ by examining the nature of ‘real-world’ context. It does this by studying the way in which listeners interpret sounds, working towards a deeper understanding of what it is that we mean by ‘real-world’ sound and context-based composition. These discussions are then utilised to explore the concept of what it means to compose context-based works and suggests that new potentials are opened up by a closer examination of the definition of context-based composition, one which liberates itself from a concern over an absolute physical nature of sounds and which embraces the use of both abstract and referential sounds. This journey highlights the importance of memory and experience within processes of interpretation and the creation of context-based compositions, and questions divisions between the virtual and the real.

Electroacoustic Feedback and the Emergence of Sound Installation: Remarks on a line of flight in the live electronic music by Alvin Lucier and Max Neuhaus

Abstract: Reflecting upon Max Neuhaus’s and Alvin Lucier’s first electronic works on electroacoustic feedback, I will consider how their research into live electronic music, meant to be performed on stage, announced a whole other form of creation, which was paradoxically emancipated from the concert hall and essential to the emergence of sound art: sound installations. If both musicians first appropriated the electronic medium for its possibilities in sound transformation, it appears that these experimentations, and more precisely those using feedback, quickly extended into areas other than research on tone and the live dimension of electronic performances. Indeed, electroacoustic feedback, as a phenomenon of retroaction, goes beyond the mere relationship to the instrument: by manifesting itself in the looping of the electroacoustic chain (microphone-amplification-speakers), it straightaway inscribes the electronic device in a spatial dimension that is linked to the propagation of sound. By analysing Neuhaus’s and Lucier’s first experiments with feedback, the specificities of their apparatuses and the experiences they aimed to create and foster, this article wishes to question the role these experiments played in the emergence of both musicians’ concern with space, which is at the core of any understanding of their later works. We can then re-read their contribution to the history of live electronic music in the light of both bifurcations and lines of flight inherent in their respective bodies of work, in order to look into the emergence of a certain art of sound installation, in which the liveness of live electronic music, far from being pushed aside, seems to lead into other forms of creation and specific aesthetic questions.

Promoting Environmental Awareness through Context-Based Composition

Abstract: Cheryl E. Leonard is a San Francisco-based composer, performer and instrument maker who utilises sounds from natural objects and field recordings to create innovative compositions that are aesthetically appealing and also promote environmental awareness. This article examines Leonard’s work Antarctica: Music from the Ice (2009–2014), which comprises ten context-based pieces created from sounds produced with natural objects (such as penguin bones, rocks and shells) and field recordings the composer collected during her visit to Antarctica in 2008–9. In particular, the article focuses on the pieces Lullaby for E Seals, White on White, Greater than 20 Knots and Ablation Zone, showing how Leonard draws attention to pertinent environmental issues through her work, while at the same time producing compositions that are aurally pleasing and engaging for performers and listeners alike.

Situated Composition in Emerging Mobile Sound Production Technologies and Practices

Abstract: This article introduces the concept of ‘situated composition’, examining it in relation to developments in mobile sound production technologies and practices. Situated composition draws attention to the specific circumstances in which sound production and compositional activity take place. With mobile devices and apps offering heightened mobility and ease-of-use, ways of working with sound increasingly may be undertaken in a wide range of contexts outside of controlled environments specifically designed for sound work such as studios. Situated composition emphasises the interconnections between the situation in which composition unfolds and the process of composition, approaching composition as inherently distributed and collaborative in multiple ways. This article begins by considering how to situate mobile audio production apps, then moves on to elaborate the concept of situated composition and investigate specific practices. Drawing primarily on interviews carried out with fourteen composers, sound artists, musicians and producers who use mobile devices and apps in their sound work, as well as on podcasts, forums and my own work as a sound artist, I identify seven approaches to using mobile interfaces, focusing particularly on practitioners’ relationships with the surroundings where compositional activity unfolds.

The Emergence of an Ecstatic-materialist Perspective as a Cross-genre Tendency in Experimental Music

Abstract: This article proposes a perspective on certain practices within experimental music based on a particular understanding of sonic materialism. By tracing correlations and marking divergences between post-spectralism, minimalism, electroacoustic music, glitch and IDM’s offshoots, this article reflects on sound-in-itself, the conception of space and time in music, poietics, perceptual and cultural factors, and suggests that there is a particular understanding of sonic materialism – which I term ecstatic-materialism – that is rooted in a synthesis of perception, theory and embodied actions. This perspective explores a new expressivity of sound in which the sound itself is the point of convergence for creative impulses and perceptual motives, sound being the common territory between composer and listener. By developing the idea of an ecstatic-sonic-materialism, various works across different genres can be brought together according to this mutual convergence on sound that embodies acoustic properties, intimate traces, external and corporeal experiences.

A Typo-morphological Approach to Human–Machine Interaction Analysis in Music

Abstract: This article proposes an analytical perspective on the aural analysis of human-machine interaction. Starting from Pierre Schaeffer's musical thinking, it focuses on the perception of sound morphologies that generate from human machine interaction. This interaction, usually interpreted under the perspective of the devices and technological innovation, will be interpreted through the perspective of musical perception and semantics. In the article, the author applies the criterion of 'allure', that permits to analyse the sound objects sustain and to indicate the sound agent as mechanical, living or natural. 'Allure' is used as a theoretical framework for the analysis of human-computer interaction in music. Inspired by a hypothetical perceptive Turing's test, the author employs the 'allure' criterion as a conceptual tool for an aural analysis of human-machine interaction: aural analysis can indeed reveal the interaction of sound agents through the cognitive mechanism of motor imagery. This approach can be extended and developed in music information retrieval. The author will develop this reflection showing the actuality of Schaeffer's perspective in HCI analysis. Finally, to highlight the interaction between human and electronic sound sources, the author will consider a case study: the first movement of Traiettoria for piano and electronics by Marco Stroppa. POST-AND TRANS-HUMAN SOUNDS The debates in ethics and Art on the transition to a post-or trans-human anthropology are today largely discussed and are frequently related to topics such as the impact of technology, the economic processes in human life, health and care systems. In this epoch, artificial intelligence and nanotechnologies are about a form of humanity that is characterized by new types of bodies (Barad 2003). According Rosi Braidotti (Braidotti 2013: 49), " contemporary bio-genetic capitalism generates a global form of reactive mutual interdependence of all living organisms, including non-humans " .